Philippines Senator Ronald Dela Rosa has taken refuge in the country’s parliament, as police sought to detain him on Monday in accordance with an ICC arrest warrant.
This is what we know of his role in former President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, which prosecutors say killed tens of thousands.
Published On 12 May 202612 May 2026
Share
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is leaving access to a widely used abortion pill untouched until at least Thursday, while the justices consider whether to allow restrictions on the drug, mifepristone, to take effect.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s order Monday allows women seeking abortions to continue obtaining the pill at pharmacies or through the mail, without an in-person visit to a doctor. It prevents restrictions on mifepristone imposed by a federal appeals court from taking effect for the time being.
The court is dealing with its latest abortion controversy four years after its conservative majority overturned Roe vs. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.
The case before the court stems from a lawsuit Louisiana filed to roll back the Food and Drug Administration’s rules on how mifepristone can be prescribed. The state claims the policy undermines the ban there, and it questions the safety of the drug, which was first approved in 2000 and has repeatedly been deemed safe and effective by FDA scientists.
Lower courts concluded that Louisiana is likely to prevail, and a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mail access and telehealth visits should be suspended while the case plays out.
The drug is most often used for abortion in combination with another drug, misoprostol. Medication abortions accounted for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. in 2023, the last year for which statistics are available.
The current dispute is similar to one that reached the court three years ago.
Lower courts then also sought to restrict access to mifepristone, in a case brought by physicians who oppose abortion. They filed suit in the months after the court overturned Roe.
The Supreme Court blocked the 5th Circuit ruling from taking effect over the dissenting votes of Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas. Then, in 2024, the high court unanimously dismissed the doctors’ suit, reasoning they did not have the legal right, or standing, to sue.
In the current dispute, mainstream medical groups, the pharmaceutical industry and Democratic members of Congress have weighed in cautioning the court against limiting access to the drug. Pharmaceutical companies said a ruling for abortion opponents would upend the drug approval process.
The FDA has eased a number of restrictions initially placed on the drug, including who can prescribe it, how it is dispensed and what kinds of safety complications must be reported.
Despite those determinations, abortion opponents have been challenging the safety of mifepristone for more than 25 years. They have filed a series of petitions and lawsuits against the agency, generally alleging that it violated federal law by overlooking safety issues with the pill.
President Trump’s administration has been unusually quiet at the Supreme Court. It declined to file a written brief recommending what the court should do, even though federal regulations are at issue.
The case puts Trump’s Republican administration in a difficult place. Trump has relied on the political support of antiabortion groups but has also seen ballot question and poll results that show Americans generally support abortion rights.
Both sides took the silence as an implicit endorsement of the appellate ruling. Alito is both the justice in charge of handling emergency appeals from Louisiana and the author of the 2022 decision that declared abortion is not a constitutional right and returned the issue to the states.
Sherman, Mulvihill and Perrone write for the Associated Press. Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, N.J.
The White House’s newly released strategy for tackling the nation’s drug and addiction crisis calls for a number of ambitious public health approaches that some experts say are laudable but will be hampered by the administration’s own actions.
The sweeping 195-page National Drug Control Strategy, published May 4, advocates for making access to treatment easier than getting drugs, preventing young people from developing addictions in the first place, increasing support for people in recovery, and reducing overdose deaths.
Those broad goals are widely supported by public health researchers, addiction treatment clinicians, and recovery advocates.
But accomplishing such goals will be difficult in the face of the administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees, cancellation of research and community grants, attacks on organizations and practices that serve people who use drugs, and cuts to Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for low-income people that is the largest payer for addiction and mental healthcare nationwide.
Many components of the National Drug Control Strategy are “things that we would agree with and that we fully support,” said Libby Jones, who leads overdose prevention efforts at the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, a public health advocacy group.
But there are “disconnects in what the strategy says is important and then what they’re actually going to fund,” she said of the Trump administration. “Those inconsistencies feel particularly loud in this strategy.”
The White House’s National Drug Control Strategy, released every two years, is a touchstone document meant to lay out the federal government’s coordinated approach to what in recent decades has been one of the country’s defining problems.
Since 2000, more than 1.1 million people have died of drug overdoses. Although deaths have decreased recently, the numbers remain elevated compared with earlier decades, and research suggests overdose death rates among Black Americans and Native Americans are disproportionately high.
The strategy document published this week is the first of President Trump’s current term. In keeping with the administration’s approach to addiction issues, it places heavy emphasis on law enforcement efforts to reduce the supply of illicit drugs. The document repeatedly refers to the ongoing “war” against “foreign terrorist organizations” — the Trump administration’s term for drug cartels — and touts increased enforcement at U.S. borders.
It also outlines plans to implement artificial intelligence technologies to screen for illicit drugs brought into the country and wastewater testing to detect illegal drug use nationwide.
The second half of the strategy focuses on reducing the demand for drugs through public health prevention efforts, addiction treatment, and support for people in recovery. It promotes the role of religion in recovery and calls for the widespread use of overdose reversal medications, such as naloxone.
In a news release, the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy called the document a “roadmap” that will “continue dismantling the drug supply and defeating the scourge of illicit drugs in our country.”
The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment about how the strategy aligns with its other actions.
In December, Trump signed a reauthorization of the SUPPORT Act, which continues several grants related to treatment and recovery and the requirement for Medicaid to cover all FDA-approved medications for opioid use disorder. In January, he announced the Great American Recovery Initiative, including a $100-million investment to address homelessness, opioid addiction, and public safety.
However, few details have been provided about the initiative, and in January, about a month after the SUPPORT Act passed, billions of dollars in addiction-related grants were abruptly terminated and reinstated within a frantic 24-hour period.
That “whiplash” left “a sense of instability and uncertainty in the field,” said Yngvild Olsen, a national adviser with the Manatt Health consultancy. She led substance use treatment policy at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, under the Biden administration and left about six months into Trump’s second term.
That insecurity was exacerbated by the president’s 2027 budget request, which proposes cuts to several addiction and mental health programs and the consolidation of key federal agencies working on those matters. Jones’ group and nearly 100 others in the field have signed a letter asking Congress to reject the proposals, as it did with similar requests last year.
The national drug strategy adds new, potentially contradictory information to this confusing landscape.
Increasing Access to Treatment
One of the most significant public health goals in the strategy, mentioned at least half a dozen times, is to make it easier to get treatment than it is to buy illegal drugs.
National data underscores the necessity: More than 80% of Americans who need substance use treatment don’t receive it.
The administration’s actions on health insurance may make it difficult to improve that statistic.
Medicaid is the main source of healthcare coverage for adults with opioid use disorder. When implemented, the Medicaid work requirements in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act are projected to strip that coverage from about 1.6 million people with substance use disorders.
The last time Medicaid rolls were purged — after COVID-era protections expired — many people who had been receiving medication treatment for opioid addiction stopped it and fewer people started treatment, according to a study published last year.
Olsen, who is also an addiction medicine doctor, said she loves the strategy’s emphasis on making treatment readily available to anyone who wants it. But she said that’s “hard to really imagine when now people may have to pay for it themselves because they may be losing their Medicaid insurance coverage.”
One analysis estimated the upcoming Medicaid changes could lead 156,000 people to lose access to medications for opioid use disorder and result in more than 1,000 additional fatal overdoses per year.
People with private insurance may be affected too.
The Trump administration has refused to enforce Biden-era regulations aimed at bolstering mental health parity, the idea that insurers must cover mental illness and addiction treatment comparably to physical treatments. And recently, the administration said it would redo those regulations altogether, raising fears that addiction treatment could become increasingly unaffordable.
The administration did not respond to specific questions about how it reconciles its actions on Medicaid and parity with the goal of increasing treatment.
Prioritizing Prevention
The strategy highlights preventing addictions before they begin as one of the keys to reducing demand for drugs. It calls for “promoting a drug-free America as the social norm” and implementing school and community-based programs that are backed by science.
“Investing in primary prevention, before drug use starts, saves lives and resources,” it says, citing several studies about the cost-effectiveness of such programs.
Yet, the president’s budget proposes cuts to these types of programs, and federal layoffs have decimated the agencies that would implement such work.
The White House’s most recent budget request proposes cutting roughly $220 million from SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and nearly $40 million from the Drug-Free Communities program.
Since the new administration started, SAMHSA has lost about half of its staff, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is down about a quarter.
“It’s not clear to me that they’re really going to be able to have the funds or the people to be able to carry that out,” Olsen said of the strategy’s prevention goals.
Another wrinkle appears in the strategy’s discussion of marijuana. The document points to marijuana use as one of the drivers of increasing drug use disorders and reports that “convergent evidence from multiple sources” suggests cannabis use increases the risk of psychosis. It calls for developing new tools to treat marijuana withdrawal and addiction.
However, just two weeks ago, the White House moved to reclassify medical marijuana to a lower tier of scheduled substances and is moving to hold a hearing to do the same for marijuana broadly.
“The administration, on the one hand, is moving in a direction of liberalizing access to cannabis,” Jones said, “but at the same time, in the strategy, it talks about the dangers of doing so.”
“There’s a disconnect there that just makes you question: Which one do you believe?” she added.
The administration did not respond to specific questions about its marijuana policies.
Stopping Overdose Deaths
One of the more surprising elements of the National Drug Control Strategy comes in the last paragraph of the final chapter. It focuses on public drug-checking programs, which often involve using test strips to help people who use drugs determine whether there are more-dangerous substances, such as fentanyl or xylazine, in the batch they bought. That helps them determine whether or how to safely use those drugs.
“Rapid test strips and similar technologies that detect fentanyl and other drugs are an important tool that should be legal,” the strategy document says.
However, SAMHSA announced in a recent letter that it would no longer pay for test strips, as part of the Trump administration’s “clear shift away from harm reduction and practices that facilitate illicit drug use.”
The administration has similarly attacked harm reduction programs in an executive order and its budget requests. It did not respond to specific questions about how this position interacts with the drug control strategy.
Regina LaBelle, a Georgetown University professor who served as acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the Biden administration, wrote about the contradiction in a blog post: “It is the height of rhetoric over reality to champion a tool while simultaneously cutting off the funding used to acquire it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, in her morning press conference Thursday, rejected criticism from the President Donald Trump over her government’s anti-drug efforts after Trump suggested the United States could take unilateral action against drug cartels operating in Mexican territory. Photo by Isaac Esquivel/EPA
May 7 (UPI) — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected criticism from the U.S. President Donald Trump over her government’s anti-drug efforts after Trump suggested the United States could take unilateral action against drug cartels operating in Mexican territory.
“President Trump has said this several times before, but we are acting,” Sheinbaum said Thursday during her daily morning press conference.
During a White House event Wednesday, Trump said his administration already had reduced maritime drug trafficking by 97% and would now begin a “land phase” against drug smuggling operations.
“If they are not going to do the job, we will,” Trump said.
Sheinbaum defended her administration’s security strategy and said Mexico has achieved a nearly 50% reduction in homicides, dismantled 2,500 clandestine laboratories used to manufacture synthetic drugs and reduced fentanyl trafficking from Mexico into the United States.
The Mexican president also urged Washington to recognize the severity of the U.S. drug consumption crisis and strengthen efforts to stop the illegal flow of firearms into Mexico.
She said the trafficking of weapons strengthens the operational capacity of criminal organizations and fuels violence across several regions of the country.
During the press conference, Sheinbaum said the 2026 U.S. National Drug Control Strategy, presented Tuesday, marked the first time the Trump administration formally acknowledged the seriousness of domestic drug consumption in the United States.
According to Sheinbaum, the report recognizes that the United States faces “a serious drug consumption problem” by proposing prevention measures, public awareness campaigns and public health programs to combat addiction.
Asked about comments made Wednesday by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to U.S. network NewsNation regarding possible new investigations into Mexican officials allegedly linked to drug trafficking, Sheinbaum again demanded evidence from U.S. authorities.
“Evidence, send evidence, because extradition treaties and mutual trust agreements require proof,” she said.
The Mexican president reiterated that drug trafficking and drug consumption must be addressed as a shared responsibility between both nations.
She said her government remains willing to cooperate with the Trump administration on security, migration and anti-drug policies, but stressed that any collaboration must respect Mexico’s sovereignty.
The 2026 U.S. National Drug Control Strategy identifies Mexico as the center of Washington’s anti-drug campaign, reaffirming the designation of Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.
The document conditions future security cooperation on measurable results in extraditions and the dismantling of drug laboratories, warning that the United States will use “all available capabilities” against criminal networks.
May 7 (UPI) — Federal law enforcement agents have arrested and charged 18 people accused of selling drugs in and around downtown Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, according to authorities who say additional drug operations will be conducted.
The 18 people arrested over the last 24 hours in the so-called Operation Free MacArthur Park are among 25 defendants named in a federal criminal complaint charging them with distribution of, and possession with intent too distribute, a controlled substance, the Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California told reporters during a press conference that some 300 federal drug and law enforcement agents participated in the raid and that they “are not going anywhere.”
“This is not a one-and-done operation,” he said. “We are here and we are not leaving.”
Under the fearless leadership of @POTUS, we are crushing the drug trade and saving countless American lives: 25 alleged drug dealers and traffickers have been arrested and federally charged in the last 24 hours.
These defendants and anyone who helps spread the scourge of drugs… pic.twitter.com/mbvTr13KqD— U.S. Department of Justice (@TheJusticeDept) May 6, 2026
Located in Los Angeles’ Westlake neighborhood, the historic MacArthur Park is within a densely populated immigrant area and has long been associated with drugs, crime and gangs.
Last summer, it was the backdrop for National Guard and federal agents deployed to the city as part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
On Wednesday, it was the location of a similar show of force as heavily armed federal drug and law enforcement agents, with military-style vehicles, conducted raids in and around the park as they sought to arrest those named in the criminal complaint.
Among those arrested were Mallaly Moreno-Lopez, 32, and her boyfriend, Jackson Tarfur, 28, whom authorities believe are the main sources of fentanyl and methamphetamine in MacArthur Park.
The pair are accused of delivering narcotics to the MacArthur Park-adjacent Alvarado Corridor to be stashed in storefronts and then distributed to street-level dealers. Their Westmont residence is allegedly used as a stash location for drugs that are to be sold in MacArthur Park, according to authorities.
The complaint alleges 27 separate drug deals between March 9 and April 15 in and around the MacArthur Park area.
According to authorities, Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration personnel seized about 40 pounds of fentanyl at one defendant’s Calabasas residence.
Seven suspects remained at large, authorities said.
Essayli said they were at MacArthur Park on Wednesday “to liberate it,” while blaming the Democratic-led government of California for allowing the area to become what the Justice Department called an open-air drug market.
“Look, we’re here today because California policies have failed. The policies of California to let people use drugs open and notoriously, with little to no criminal consequences, is a failed experiment,” he said.
“MacArthur Park should be for families, should be for residents of Los Angeles, not for drug dealers and gangsters.”
The Los Angeles Police Department said it assisted the federal agencies in the operation.
Park Wang-yeol (C), a South Korean national detained in the Philippines, arrives at Incheon International Airport in Incheon, South Korea, 25 March 2026. Photo by YONHAP / EPA
May 1 (Asia Today) — South Korean police have taken custody of a man suspected of supplying drugs to a major narcotics figure, following his arrest in Thailand, authorities said Friday.
The suspect, identified only by his surname Choi, 51, is accused of smuggling and distributing about 22 kilograms of methamphetamine, valued at roughly 10 billion won ($7.4 million), into South Korea since 2019.
Police said Choi, who allegedly operated under the aliases “Cheongdam” or “Cheongdam Boss” on the messaging app Telegram, was identified as a key supplier to drug trafficker Park Wang-yeol, often referred to as a “drug kingpin.”
The National Police Agency’s drug and organized crime unit said it received custody of Choi from Thai authorities and has launched a full investigation into his activities and connections.
Investigators began tracking Choi while probing Park, who was previously arrested in the Philippines. Authorities combined five outstanding cases involving Choi and designated the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency as the lead investigative body.
Although no official departure record for Choi had been found since 2018, police developed intelligence suggesting he was living in Thailand. Working through liaison officers stationed in both countries, South Korean and Thai police coordinated the operation.
Authorities located Choi in Samut Prakan province, about an hour from Bangkok, and conducted a three-day joint surveillance operation before arresting him on April 10 on charges of illegal stay.
Police said the suspect was apprehended within seven days of the formal request for cooperation, and repatriated to South Korea about three weeks later with assistance from the South Korean Embassy in Thailand and related agencies.
Items seized at the time of arrest, including a passport under another person’s name and electronic devices, will undergo digital forensic analysis to determine links to Park and to identify additional accomplices and distribution networks.
Police said the investigation will expand to include possible conspiracy with Park, violations of passport laws and broader drug trafficking activities. Authorities are also pursuing asset recovery tied to alleged criminal proceeds.
Acting National Police Commissioner Yoo Jae-sung said interagency cooperation – including coordination with customs, financial regulators, tax authorities, the food and drug safety agency and the National Intelligence Service – has been mobilized to track and dismantle transnational drug networks.
“This case sends a clear message that drug criminals will be pursued and apprehended to the ends of the earth,” Yoo said.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.
Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260501010000003
Ruben Rocha Moya again denies allegations he shielded cartel, says taking ‘temporary leave’ to defend self.
The governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state has temporarily resigned days after being charged by United States authorities in a sweeping drug trafficking indictment that has further strained relations between the two countries.
In a brief video statement posted late Friday, Ruben Rocha Moya again denied any wrongdoing, but said he was taking “temporary leave” to defend himself against the US allegations.
list of 3 itemsend of list
The indictment unsealed by US prosecutors earlier this week claimed that Rocha Moya and nine other officials directly aided the Sinaloa drug cartel in its smuggling operations in exchange for political support and bribes.
That support included members of the powerful cartel kidnapping and threatening opposition candidates in the 2021 election and stealing paper ballots cast for those running against Rocha Moya, the indictment charged.
Rocha Moya is a member of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s progressive Morena party.
“My conscience is clear,” Rocha Moya said in the video message. “To my people and to my family, I can look you in the eye because I have never betrayed you, and I never will.”
Juan de Dios Gamez Mendivil, the mayor of the Sinaloa state capital Culiacan who was among the other officials charged by the US, also announced he would step down on Saturday. He has denied the allegations.
Sheinbaum has also pushed back on charges, which come at a time when she has sought to navigate tense relations with the administration of US President Donald Trump.
On Thursday, she said her government had not been provided with any concrete evidence to back up the claims, suggesting the information laid out in the indictment was insufficient.
“My position on these events is as follows: truth, justice and the defence of sovereignty,” Sheinbaum said.
She added that if “clear and irrefutable evidence” is presented, the US still must proceed “in accordance with the law under our jurisdiction”.
Sheinbaum maintained her government will not “shield anyone who has committed a crime”.
“However, if there is no clear evidence,” she added, “it is evident that the aim of these charges by the [US] Department of Justice is political.”
Since taking office in January of last year, the Trump administration has heaped pressure on Mexico to do more to address migration and drug smuggling.
The approach has included Washington imposing a host of tariffs as leverage against Mexico’s government.
The US State Department has also labelled several Latin American drug cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organisations”, an unorthodox move in line with the administration’s more militaristic approach to Latin America.
The administration has broadly argued that the criminal groups are driven, in part, by efforts to destabilise the US, a claim rejected by many longtime experts.
Sheinbaum has walked a careful line with Trump, increasing cooperation in countering cartels while pledging to protect Mexico’s sovereignty. Notably, she has staunchly opposed the prospect of any US military action on Mexican soil.
But experts have said charging elected officials in Mexico represents a major escalation in the Trump administration’s strategy.
Speaking to Al Jazeera this week, Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on non-state armed groups at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, DC, said the approach had “long been considered a very big step, almost a ‘nuclear option’”.
She predicted more US indictments were likely to come.
A CLEANER accused of supplying Liam Payne with drugs before his death could be let off with community service and a rehab course after reportedly striking a plea deal.
Ezequiel David Pereyra, who worked at the Argentina hotel where the ex-One Direction star died, might not face trial and his sentence could be cut from a possible 15 years to a suspended term.
Last night sources said Pereyra was “over the moon”.
The sources also claimed waiter Braian Nahuel Paiz, who is also accused of supplying cocaine to the star, has been offered the same deal. However it is understood that Paiz, 25, will not be accepting the deal.
It came as Liam’s girlfriend, Kate Cassidy, posted a heartbreaking video of her last day with the singer, showing them riding horses together.
A source said: “This will be terribly upsetting for Liam’s loved ones to hear — as there is now the possibility that there will never be a trial and they will never get answers as to what happened that night.
“No one will be held accountable for his death.”
Pereyra, 22, was awaiting trial for allegedly selling cocaine to Liam, 31, before he fell to his death from his hotel balcony in Buenos Aires in October 2024.
He was facing a hefty jail sentence if found guilty.
But his new lawyer, Augusto Maria Cassiau, is said to have struck a deal with prosecutors to lessen his charge if he admitted his role in the incident.
His new charge will be “facilitation for personal consumption, non-profit” — admitting he gave the drugs to Liam when he died but he was not a dealer.
Pereyra has been offered a two-year suspended sentence, with time already served in custody awaiting trial being taken into consideration.
He will have to perform community service and complete a drug awareness course.
Pereyra was released from jail and put under house arrest in December after an appeal court agreed he had family support, a fixed address and no criminal record.
Last month Paiz, who was also released from prison in December, had his house arrest conditions scrapped.
No new evidence has appeared in the case file and prosecutors have been unable to secure a trial date.
In October, on the first anniversary of Liam’s death, Pereyra exclusively spoke to The Sun, offering his condolences to Liam’s family.
He also claimed bosses at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel ignored Liam’s drug use.
In a TikTok video posted on Wednesday, the same day prosecutors offered a plea deal, Kate, 27, can be seen riding horses with Liam.
She wrote: “Enjoy each moment life brings you.
“Because I didn’t know this would be the last time I’d ever see my boyfriend again in this lifetime.”
Liam had flown to Argentina with Kate to see his former 1D bandmate Niall Horan in concert.
Liam extended the trip but Kate returned to the US.
An autopsy confirmed he died from multiple trauma and internal and external bleeding.
US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton said in the statement: “As the indictment lays bare, the Sinaloa cartel, and other drug trafficking organisations like it, would not operate as freely or successfully without corrupt politicians and law enforcement officials on their payroll”.
April 27 (UPI) — The U.S. military has killed another three men in its latest attack targeting suspected drug-trafficking boats in the eastern Pacific, U.S. Southern Command announced late Sunday.
It was the 54th strike in the Trump administration’s violent anti-drug smuggling campaign that has killed at least 185 people since early September, according to UPI’s tally of publicly released data. At least 57 boats have been destroyed in the attacks in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean.
SOUTHCOM has announced each strike on social media, accompanied by a short black-and-white aerial video of the attack, showing the boat erupting in flames.
On April 26, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known… pic.twitter.com/br2znnUM1x— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) April 27, 2026
As with the previous strikes, SOUTHCOM said in a statement that the boat it attacked Sunday “was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
The Trump administration claims the vessels are operated by 10 drug cartels and gangs that President Donald Trump has designated as terrorist organizations since returning to office, but has yet to provide evidence.
Trump argues the use of deadly force is warranted as the United States is in “armed conflict” with those organizations, but his administration has come under mounting accusations of conducting extrajudicial killings.
The strikes have been repeatedly condemned and their legality questioned by Democrats and human rights organizations, who accuse the Trump administration of violating international and maritime law by using the military to conduct law enforcement drug operations.
Ben Saul, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, chastised the Trump administration last month for “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”
The attacks are not permissible law enforcement action in self-defense, authorized under the law of the sea, in national self-defense or under international humanitarian law, he said.
On Thursday, 125 humanitarian, human rights, peacebuilding and other related organizations from around the world called on all states to “immediately cease or refrain from supporting U.S. extrajudicial killings.”
The letter warned that states could be held legally responsible for aiding or assisting the United States by sharing intelligence as well as providing access to military bases and logistical support with the U.S. military.
The groups argue that the consequences of these killings are being felt throughout the hemisphere.
“Families awaiting the return of their loved ones may never know what happened to them and have no access to recourse,” the organizations said in their open letter.
“Coastal communities have witnessed human remains washing up on shore and fear for their lives when they trade and fish, sowing psychological trauma and undermining livelihoods.”
The Trump administration’s historic move to reclassify state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug was cheered by some advocates but for others, it fell far short for the thousands still incarcerated on federal cannabis-related convictions.
The executive order, which acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche signed Thursday, does not address current penalties for possessing and selling marijuana or those jailed with yearslong sentences.
“While this is a victory, the fight is far from over,” said Jason Ortiz, director of strategic initiatives for the Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit focused on cannabis criminal justice reform.
Proponents of legalizing marijuana as well as overhauling prison sentencing say this order, which does not completely decriminalize the drug, benefits only cannabis researchers, growers and others in Big Weed. Meanwhile, thousands — many of whom are people of color — are stuck serving harsh sentences for marijuana-related offenses. Or they have served their time but having a conviction on their record has made life difficult.
Now, advocates are calling on Congress and state lawmakers to take concrete steps to ensure those with marijuana-related convictions receive fair treatment or be forgiven altogether.
Blanche’s order reclassifies state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug. The major policy shift, which both Presidents Obama and Joe Biden had considered, means cannabis won’t be grouped with drugs like heroin.
But it does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use. It shifts licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I — reserved for drugs without medical use and with high potential for abuse — to the less strictly regulated Schedule III. This will likely give licensed medical marijuana operators and cannabis researchers a major tax break and less stringent barriers to doing normal business.
Virtually no one imprisoned at the federal level is there solely for marijuana possession. But many are there for large-scale possession, trafficking offenses or both.
Hector Ruben McGurk, 66, has been serving life without the possibility of parole since 2007 for transporting thousands of pounds of marijuana and money laundering. He is currently imprisoned in Beaumont, Texas, over 800 miles from his son’s El Paso home. His incarceration has been hard on his son, said McGurk’s daughter-in-law, Ferna Anguiano. And the distance makes visits logistically difficult.
So it’s tempting to see this order as a glimmer of hope, given that the family believes McGurk’s punishment far outweighs his crimes. But Anguiano has no idea how to navigate lobbying for his release.
“His release date is death,” Anguiano said. “I mean, we see all this stuff on the news — bigger cases, fatal cases — and people are going in and out of prison and coming out to their families.”
They try to keep in touch through phone calls and a prison texting service. They’re concerned about McGurk’s health and his diabetes management. It would be a dream come true for him to come home.
“He deserves a second chance,” Anguiano said. “Yes, it was a poor decision he did in his lifetime. He was younger. But he is not a bad person. I think it’s fair to say he has served enough time for it.”
It’s not clear whether punishments would be different had marijuana always been scheduled differently, drug policy experts say.
“In addition to schedule-specific penalties, there are marijuana-specific penalties that have nothing to do with the schedule,” said Cat Packer, director of drug markets and legal regulation at the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance. “Even if marijuana were to be moved to Schedule V, those criminal penalties would still exist and there are mandatory minimums for simple possession.”
Destigmatizing marijuana has long been an issue for both political parties. Obama commuted the sentences of about 1,900 federal prisoners, almost all of whom were incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes. Biden pardoned 6,500 people convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia. President Trump’s administration has taken far fewer drug clemency actions and does not have an overarching policy directing such actions.
“What many people on the right and the left would like is to move marijuana from this ‘just as bad as heroin’ category and to just sort of de-schedule it entirely,” said Marta Nelson, director of sentencing reform at the Vera Institute of Justice. “Regulate it like you do alcohol or tobacco.”
Studies show Black Americans are roughly 3.7 to 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white Americans, despite usage rates being roughly the same across racial groups. Federal-level marijuana cases are pretty small today, but those serving sentences for federal drug offenses are overwhelmingly Hispanic and Black, according to Justice Department and Bureau of Justice Statistics data.
The racial disparity with drug convictions is reminiscent of 2010 legislation Obama signed reducing the gap between mandatory sentences for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. In 2018, Trump made it apply retroactively.
Because business owners with state medical marijuana licenses are predominantly white, the tax relief created by the rescheduling will also likely give a leg up to mostly white businesses, Packer said. A lot of equity programs won’t apply.
“This is going to, in my mind, widen the gap, the financial disparities, the business disparities that currently exist between Black and brown, Latino and white owners in the cannabis industry because licenses were not distributed equitably,” Packer said.
In theory, Trump could issue a blanket pardon like he did for Jan. 6 rioters. But Nelson thinks that is highly doubtful.
“Having marijuana convictions on the record for things like mass immigration enforcement is helpful to the administration,” Nelson said.
An impactful next step would be for Congress to outline very comprehensive legislation addressing existing marijuana-related convictions, expungements and industry regulations, she added.
The Last Prisoner Project and other organizations are planning to renew a dialogue with federal lawmakers, including the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, which includes Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Republican Rep. David Joyce of Ohio. They will also continue to lobby for Trump to conduct a large-scale act of commutation and clemency.
Advocates are also hoping Trump’s order will prompt every state to rethink their marijuana classification and penalties.
“It is imperative that every state review their situation, as a lot of their controlled substances at the state level are tied to the federal government,” Ortiz said. “We’re gonna see other states that are going to need a little help from the public to remind them what the right thing to do is.”
Tang writes for the Associated Press.
April 23 (UPI) — On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced a new drug price deal with Regeneron, the latest to agree to the “most favored nation” price policy the White House has pushed since last year.
The price deals involve voluntary price cuts by manufacturers for drugs sold to the public and the government through the TrumpRx website. In return, the manufacturers get breaks on Trump’s tariffs and other perks.
In addition, Regeneron also announced Thursday that the Federal Food and Drug Administration has approved Otarmeni, a gene therapy for genetic hearing loss. The company said the therapy would be available free in the United States.
The company is the last of the 17 the administration sought for the price policy, but officials said that more will follow. Smaller companies may also look to make deals.
“It’s not the finish line,” said Chris Klomp of the Department of Health and Human Services, who was chief negotiator on the deals, the Washington Post reported.
For the most part, the discounts do not affect people with private insurance or those on Medicaid, Axios reported. They do affect Medicaid drug prices and those buying through the TrumpRx website.
Trump called the program “the biggest price reduction in drugs in history.”
However, some have said the prices are higher through TrumpRx than through other sources, the Washington Post reported. Some lawmakers also are calling for the confidential terms of the agreements to be released, a subject that came up in hearings this week with Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has not committed to such a release.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s acting attorney general on Thursday signed an order reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug, a major policy shift long sought by advocates who said cannabis should never have been treated like heroin by the federal government.
The order signed by Todd Blanche does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law. But it does change the way it’s regulated, shifting licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I — reserved for drugs without medical use and with high potential for abuse — to the less strictly regulated Schedule III. It also gives licensed medical marijuana operators a major tax break and eases some barriers to researching cannabis.
The Trump administration also said it was jump-starting the process for reclassifying marijuana more broadly, setting a hearing to begin in late June.
Trump told his administration in December to work as quickly as possible to reclassify marijuana. On Saturday, as the Republican president signed an unrelated executive order about psychedelics, he seemed to express frustration that it was taking so long.
Blanche said Thursday that the Department of Justice was “delivering on President Trump’s promise” to expand Americans’ access to medical treatment options. “This rescheduling action allows for research on the safety and efficacy of this substance, ultimately providing patients with better care and doctors with more reliable information,” he said in a statement.
Blanche’s action largely legitimizes medical marijuana programs in the 40 states that have adopted them. It sets up an expedited system for state-licensed medical marijuana producers and distributors to register with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
It makes clear that cannabis researchers won’t be penalized for obtaining state-licensed marijuana or marijuana-derived products for use in their work, and it grants state-licensed medical marijuana companies a windfall by allowing them, for the first time, to deduct business expenses on their federal taxes.
Any marijuana-derived medicine approved by the Food and Drug Administration is similarly listed in Schedule III, it said.
Since 2015, Congress has prohibited the Justice Department from using its resources to shut down state-licensed medical marijuana systems. But the order nevertheless represents a major policy shift for the U.S. government, which has continued its long-standing marijuana prohibition — dating to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 — even as nearly all the states have approved cannabis use in some form.
Two dozen states plus Washington, D.C., have authorized adult recreational use of marijuana, 40 have medical marijuana systems, and eight others allow low-THC cannabis or CBD oil for medical use. Only Idaho and Kansas ban marijuana outright.
The regulation of medical marijuana has come a long way since California became the first state to adopt it in 1996, Blanche wrote.
“Today the vast majority of States maintain comprehensive licensing frameworks governing cultivation, processing, distribution, and dispensing of marijuana for medical purposes,” Blanche wrote. “Taken as a whole, they demonstrate a sustained capacity to achieve the public-interest objectives … including protecting public health and safety and preventing the diversion of controlled substances into illicit channels.”
The president of the American Trade Assn. for Cannabis and Hemp, Michael Bronstein, called it “the most significant federal advancement in cannabis policy in over 50 years.”
“This action recognizes what Americans have long known, cannabis is medicine,” he said in a written statement.
The Trump administration’s decision drew derision from marijuana legalization opponent Kevin Sabet, the chief executive of Smart Approaches to Marijuana. Sabet said that while marijuana research is necessary, “there are many ways to increase our knowledge without giving a tax break to Big Weed and sending a confusing message about marijuana’s harms to the American public.”
“With this move, we are now confronted with the most pro-drug administration in our history,” Sabet said in a text message. “Policy is now being dictated by marijuana CEOs, psychedelics investors, and podcasters in active addiction.”
Marijuana or marijuana-derived products that are not distributed through a state medical marijuana program will continue to be classified in Schedule I.
Schedule III drugs are defined as having moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. Some critics of the industry have suggested that legalization in the states has led to stronger and stronger cannabis products, which need to be researched rather than categorized less strictly than before.
The Justice Department under President Biden had proposed to reclassify marijuana, eliciting nearly 43,000 formal public comments. The DEA was still in the review process when Trump succeeded Biden, and Trump ordered that process to move along as quickly as legally possible.
Blanche’s order sidestepped the review process by relying on a provision of federal law that allows the attorney general to determine the appropriate classification for drugs that the U.S. must regulate pursuant to an international treaty.
It was unclear how the order might affect operations in states where licensed recreational marijuana shops also sell to medical patients. In Washington state, which in 2012 became one of the first states to legalize the adult use of marijuana, 302 of 460 licensed stores have endorsements allowing them to sell tax-free cannabis products to registered patients.
Many Republicans oppose loosening marijuana restrictions. More than 20 Republican senators, several of them staunch Trump allies, signed a letter last year urging the president to keep the current standards.
Trump has made his crusade against other drugs, especially fentanyl, a feature of his second term, ordering U.S. military attacks on Venezuelan and other boats the administration insists are ferrying drugs. He signed another executive order declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.
Richer and Johnson write for the Associated Press. Johnson reported from Seattle.
It felt like the Olympics. Crowds cheering. The American flag standing tall above the bleachers. Trainers jumping with anticipation. A swimmer staring in disbelief at the clock after his final stroke. The Jumbotron announced: Kristian Gkolomeev — 20.89 seconds. A new world record in the 50-meter freestyle.
Well, kind of.
I’ve left out some details. There was only one swimmer. The crowd? Just doctors, trainers and filmmakers. This was not in an Olympic city nor an Olympic year, but in Greensboro, N.C., in 2025. And there were no iconic rings on the banners, just “Enhanced Games.”
Yes, Gkolomeev swam faster than César Cielo, the official record holder at the time (20.91 seconds). But he did it “enhanced” — a polite way to say that he used performance-enhancing drugs. At the Enhanced Games, doping isn’t punished. It’s required.
The concept, as described by the organization: “to create the definitive scientific, cultural and sporting movement that safely evolves mankind into a new superhumanity.”
Backed by investors such as Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital, the Enhanced Games embodies a techno-utopian ideal: athletes as canvases for chemical optimization, testing the limits of human health for a lot of money. Gkolomeev earned $1 million for his record.
So far, the competition has happened at one-off pop-up events. But in May, Las Vegas will host the first full-scale Enhanced Games, a four-day meet in swimming, track and field, and weightlifting. The group advertises a “potential prize purse of $7.5 million for just a single day of competition,” plus appearance fees.
Does it need to be said? Apparently yes: The Enhanced Games glorifies the risky use of enhancement drugs.
Steroids can harden arteries, elevate stroke risk, damage the liver and permanently alter hormone systems. They are not electrolyte tablets or a little preworkout creatine. If Lance Armstrong had been rewarded — rather than sanctioned — for doping, what would have happened to competitive cycling?
Fans — and especially kids — mimic their idols. As risky as the drugs are for athletes at the Enhanced Games, with its “medical commission” to give the illusion of safety, the substances are even more dangerous when used by people without medical supervision.
The games also expose the economic neglect that drives athletes toward such competition. As Benjamin Proud, the British silver medalist who recently joined the Enhanced Games, put it: “It would have taken me 13 years of winning a World Championship title in order to win what I could win in one race at these games.”
Indeed, the Enhanced Games might look like an easy way out. Only nine swimmers worldwide received prize money and performance bonuses above $75,000 in 2025, according to World Aquatics.
Investors clearly hope to make money off the games as well. The organization is moving closer to becoming a publicly traded company. The economics are not mysterious.
But the Enhanced Games are not just another sporting event. They are an arena for biomedical experimentation and should be regulated as such. The games should face limits similar to those imposed on other high-risk industries, including age restrictions and strict advertising rules.
We already know how to govern legal, profitable activities that carry serious health risks.
In the United States, that means oversight from the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission — bodies that regulate drug protocols and police misleading commercial claims. A steroid-based competition should not be treated as a sport but as a medical experiment and a marketing stunt.
Regulations on pharmaceutical advertising offer a useful model for the Enhanced Games. Prescription drugs are advertised every night on television, but only under strict rules. They require fair balance (content must present benefits and risks with comparable prominence, readability and duration) and a “major statement” of risks (most serious risks must be spoken aloud and not obscured by visuals or music).
Right now, when you play Gkolomeev’s “world-record” video on YouTube, a medical-risk warning appears for barely five seconds — then vanishes. If a cholesterol drug must audibly warn viewers of stroke risk, why shouldn’t a steroid-based competition do the same?
Enhanced Games content should be accompanied by clear warnings of the risks of performance-enhancing drugs and be clearly labeled, age-gated and distributed as high-risk content more akin to pornography than to a boxing match.
Prohibition is not the answer. Trying to shut down these games only fuels a controversy-driven brand. Just recently, the Enhanced Games sued organizations such as World Aquatics and the World Anti-Doping Agency, alleging antitrust violations and that blocking athletes from participating at the Enhanced Games is illegal. As those organizations fight back, they will be seeking to protect the integrity of mainstream sports, but they will also inadvertently be promoting the Enhanced Games.
If we want kids to admire clean athletes rather than those using banned drugs, the Las Vegas launch must not reach the world as a Super Bowl would. The Enhanced Games should not be televised or allowed to stream online to minors. Otherwise, Las Vegas, in May, risks becoming an unregulated public-health experiment mislabeled as a sporting event.
Fabricio Ramos dos Santos is a lawyer, entrepreneur and sports investor.
For disputed reasons, April 20, abbreviated to 420, has become a day to celebrate marijuana; even if this is nothing you mark on your calendar, the collective culture is bound to remind you.
Weed is not what it used to be, which is to say illegal everywhere. (State laws may differ, but the federal government still disapproves.) Stoners are no longer useful as a comedy device, while pot’s countercultural meaning has dissipated as it’s been absorbed into the mainstream. According to the CDC, some 60 million American reported using it in 2022. Snoop Dogg is a beloved media figure (and, somehow, an Olympics commentator). Seth Rogen co-owns a cannabis company, Houseplant, that also sells coffee, furniture and incense. The paper you are reading has published weed-themed gift guides.
Now, Hulu, wholly owned by the Walt Disney Company, is marking the day (Monday) with “4×20: Quick Hits,” a frisky anthology comprising four 20-minute documentaries on pot-related subjects, with family-friendly figure Jimmy Kimmel as an executive producer. It’s less about the drug itself than the arts, crafts and enterprises it has inspired. Given where we are now, it’s not surprising that there’s a historical bent to the films, a look back to earlier times — certainly worse for some of the people profiled, who were targeted by and battled with the law in pursuit of their businesses and dreams — but one they regard with a kind of amused nostalgia.
All the films are affectionate, most are light-hearted and often comical. One, Todd Kapostasy’s “Bong Voyage,” about the rise and fall and rise of artisanal glassblower Jason Harris, is narrated by one of his creations and includes such dumb puns as “fine piece of glass.” Directed by Brent Hodge, “Highly Unlikely” is an entertaining, straightforward reminiscence of the making of “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” though it is less about the stoner themes than how the film broke stereotypes in making two little-known Asian actors, John Cho and Kal Penn, the film’s stars. The adorable “The Legend of Ganjasaurus Rex,” directed by Alex Ross Perry, and nearly the premise for a Christopher Guest movie, recounts an act of community filmmaking in the late ‘80s in pot-growing Humboldt County, wherein locals created a monster movie in a proxy war with the authorities, and its inspirational afterlife.
More serious in tone is Kyle Thrash‘s “High Times,” which looks at the history of the pot-centric magazine, its drug smuggling founder Tom Forçade and his suicide. More compelling perhaps is his friend, Yippie co-founder and lifelong cannabis activist Dana Beal, who frames the film; we see him in the nearly present day on trial for drug trafficking, having been stopped in Idaho with 56 pounds of raw marijuana, and also on the streets of New York leafleting passersby with his daughter to “help us legalize weed worldwide.”
Whether or not cannabis itself interests you, each of these mini-docs is capable of holding your attention for 20 minutes — assuming you’re capable from your end — and, being as brief as they are, may well send you to learn more. (I don’t imagine they will send you to smoke pot if you don’t — they didn’t work on me, anyway — and, who knows, might even make one less inclined.) You might finally watch “Harold & Kumar,” or find Garberville on a map, or look to see how things are going for Beal, or discover whether the same John Holmstrom who once edited High Times is the same person who founded Punk magazine and drew covers for the Ramones’ “Rocket to Russia” and “Road to Ruin” albums. (He is.) “Ganjasaurus Rex,” in its 90-minute full length, is itself online to see, and, for those who celebrate, I don’t suppose there’s a better day to watch it.
April 20 (UPI) — The U.S. military announced late Sunday that it has killed three men in its latest strike targeting a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean.
Seventeen people have been killed in six strikes the U.S. Southern Command has carried out in little over a week, marking one of the deadliest publicly announced stretches of the Trump administration’s monthslong anti-drug smuggling operation.
As in previous strike announcements, SOUTHCOM released little information.
The attack occurred Sunday, targeting a boat operated by a designated terrorist organization in the Caribbean, SOUTHCOM said in a statement, without naming the organization or providing evidence.
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” it said.
A 12-second, black-and-white clip of the strike posted to SOUTHCOM’s social media shows a boat moving across the ocean before disappearing in a large fiery explosion.
On April 19, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known… pic.twitter.com/yMtPhXBdNn— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) April 20, 2026
Since the first strike on Sept. 2, the U.S. military has killed at least 180 people, according to UPI’s tally of publicly released data. Fifty-five boats have been destroyed in the more than 50 strikes.
President Donald Trump argues that the use of deadly military force is warranted as the United States is in “armed conflict” with the 10 drug cartels and gangs he has designated as terrorist organizations since returning to the White House in January 2025.
The operation comes as the Trump administration seeks to expand its influence in the Western Hemisphere, including by using its military to dismantle what Trump has called “narco-terrorist networks.”
The strikes have been repeatedly condemned and their legality questioned by Democrats, rights groups, critics and United Nations experts, who accuse the Trump administration of violating international and maritime law over the use of the military to conduct law enforcement drug operations.
Last month, Ben Saul, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, lambasted the Trump administration over “its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”
“These serial extrajudicial killings gravely violate the right to life, which applies extraterritorially,” he said on March 13.
“The attacks were not in national self-defense, since the vessels were not engaged in any armed attack on the U.S. Drug trafficking is crime, not war.”
On Wednesday, the same day the U.S. military killed three people in a strike in the eastern Pacific, a group of Democrats, led by Rep. John Larson of Connecticut, filed six articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, with one of the articles accusing him of violating the law of armed conflict over the strikes.
Larson accused Hegseth of abusing his position by ordering “our armed forces to strike boats in the Caribbean,” he said in a statement.
